2nd day of Field Study - Nazareth, Sipporis, and Beth-Shean

This is Liz, me, Laurie and Chelsea, we are getting ready to start our day, standing outside of our hotel in Nazareth, ready to get on the bus. The city of Nazareth is in the background. The conical shaped church steeple to the right of the green hood is the Church of the Anunciation, to commemorate where Mary was visited by the angel to tell her she would have a child.

 We are at the ancient site of the city of Sipporis, very close to Nazareth, a village Jesus would have probably visited often as he was growing up and working as a carpenter. Just a picture of some fieldl flowers and a village in the background.

 At the site of Sipporis, there are amazing floor mosaics. This one, that they call the 'Mona Lisa' is in a Triclenium Dining room, where they would recline to eat. It was in a very wealthy home, and the mosaic was just huge.

 Sipporis, a Jewish city that they found a lot of Greek influence in, including a mosaic of the zodiac inside a Jewish synagogue.

 More floor mosaics in Sipporis, really amazing artwork.

 Here we are way up on the Nazareth ridge, which is a hill that sits above Nazareth, and looks down into the expansive Jezreel Valley.  Jesus would have certainly climbed up here when he was growing up to see the view. This is also the traditional site of where the people from Nazareth wanted to stone Jesus, and he walked right through the midst of them so they could not throw him off.  Christians in Nazareth however believe he jumped off the cliff instead, and they call this "The Precupice".

 We are now at Beth-Shean, a very large, historic and important city on the edge of the Jezreel Valley. It had a tremendous Egyptian influence, and was basic a pagan city. The green hill you see in the background is the 'tel' where the ancient canaanite city ruins are (we climbed up there), but later when the city was expanded by Romans they built it down below, because their style was long flat streets. This was a very wealthy city with a large population.

 Many columns have fallen down at Beth-Shean by an earthquake that occurred a long time ago.

 So here we are sitting on one of those columns - that's me in the blue t-shirt, enjoying all the young ladies around me.

 This is our 'THINKER' pose....what do YOU think?

 Well, I am sorry to subject you to this, but this was a Roman style bathroom and it could accomodate a couple dozen people at the same times...no stall doors, either. What you did was straddle 2 marble slabs. I love Chelsea's look, the girl to the right of me:)

 Some Roman columns in the theather of the city.

Just had to show you this...we arrived at our hotel at the end of the day, at En Gev, which is on te east side of the Sea of Galilee.  I went straight to my room, straight out to the balcony, which had this tremendous view, and snapped this picture of the sunset over the Sea of Galilee.  What a wonderful ending to a superb day!!